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Review of The Decroly Class by A. Hamaide

Ellsworth Faris

This volume is an admirable account of one of the "new schools" aiming to
reform education which has attracted considerable attention. Dr. Decroly began,
like Montessori, with abnormal children and gradually came to include a scheme
for the entire field of elementary education.

Teaching is an art, and when an innovator starts a new departure he is
apparently guided by his more or less inarticulate feeling for certain values
and for practices that will realize these. Later on there is a desire to
appear reasonable to others and the result is usually a more or less completely
formulated "system." The new practice is then defended be-cause it is in accord
with the "laws of psychology," whereupon the traditional fixity against which
revolt has been staged is replaced by a new fixity which acquires the essential
qualities of the older absolutism. The short vogue of Montessori seems to be
thus explained. Embodying certain very clever and valuable devices,
the influence on education has been relatively small because the program could
not be conceived as a free,

(
314) vital, and modest experiment. It claimed to be based on a rigid set of
fixed principles, and the same can be said of the Decroly method, or any other
comparable one. The difficulty lies in the fact that the fixity concerns a
different system in each case. They cannot all be right; it may be that they are
all wrong.

No one can read the account of Dr. Decroly's work without a feeling of
admiration, not only for his enthusiasm and insight, but also for his results.
He employed a flexible curriculum. He emphasized the primary concern with the
"here and now." He introduced coeducation in a land where it was frowned upon.
He abolished the straight lines of immovable seats, which for Belgium was an
innovation. He introduced parent-teachers' associations, which to them was
strange and new, and he reformed discipline in a land where the military
pattern had long obtained.

Nevertheless, one has reservations. The program is based on the
"fundamental needs of the child." It rests upon the theory of instincts.
Moreover, they are home-made instincts, manufactured, as always, to meet a
condition. There are mainly four: feeding himself, protecting himself from want,
defending himself against his enemies, and answering his need for work. Now it
is possible to get all the curriculum of the school under these four, and if
they be combined with the three strictly separated processes, observation,
association, and expression, all the subjects in the curriculum are readmitted.
This is held to prove that the classification is sound.

The walrus said that it was time to talk of shoes and ships and sealing-wax
and cabbages and kings. If the reader doubts it, let him try and he will find it
possible to organize the entire curriculum on the basis of the above topics of
conversation suggested by the wise and versatile sea mammal. Shoes would involve
leather, cloth and rubber, which would lead you quickly to the western plains,
the stockyards, the cotton fields and mills, and the rubber forests, from which
you could go to rubber tires and the science of pneumatics. As for ships, they
lead back to the canoe and include submarines, to say nothing of antarctic
explorers. Any classification is true if one reads into the terms a wide
content.

The fundamental instincts of men are too indefinite to encourage dogmatism_
Some solid foundation might be found for a curriculum if the mores of one's
people and the social demands were taken as the point of departure. Children
like to know what adults are doing, and are interested in the apparatus of civilization. It is almost ludicrous to find the love
of a toy steam-engine explained as the satisfying of a need for trans-

(
315) -portation which the child feels. The division into observation,
association, and expression seems rigid, artificial, and unnecessary.

The above criticisms are not against the work of the Decroly School but
against the attempt to generalize from the admirable and praiseworthy work of a
gifted group, and to hold out a warning that the theoretical foundation must be
laboriously constructed.

The new schools are many, and should be encouraged by every forward-looking
soul, but the cause which they have at heart would be advanced much more quickly
if they could begin and remain frankly experimental, tentative, and too modest
to attempt a fixed system.

ELLSWORTH FARIS
UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

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